Why do some people feel the need to describe themselves as ‘middle class’?

[lottieandmia22]

I met a man who said

‘I am incredibly lucky. I’m a middle class, white, straight male which puts me at an advantage’

Frankly, this made my teeth itch. I thought ‘what a tosser’

Why do people feel the need to do this? I couldn’t care less which class I am.

I think it's my iPhone predictive text haha

In many ways I have an upper middle class life.

But I still identify as working class. I feel it very keenly, perhaps more so the older I get. It's my heritage and runs through me.

Haven't rtft but have never really understood the class system. I'm a teacher, DH owns a restaurant. Parents owned corner shops when we were growing up.

So what r we?

Just did some test on BBC magazine after searching middle class on google and it came up that I was Elite class. Don't think so!! Made me LOL.

I dont get it. There is absolutely nothing to be proud of to be from working class or middle class. It does not mean you are a better more caring, salt of the earth person. I've met working class people who are crude and love to shoe off. Based on my slaary I'm in the high earner bracket, have degrees but I shop at ASDA, and I dont flaunt my wealth. My BIL's fiance whos a dinner lady would always correct BIL that they shop at Sainsbury's not ASDA and that she spent over 7k on a foreign holiday. she lives in a council estate and I dont. But does it mean she is a better person who has more humility than I am because she happens to define herself as working class? I'm not British so it always baffles me. It screams insecurity and wanting to be liked whenever people even when they have money say they are working class.

Barbara, actually it wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at anyone who is typically middle class by the dictionary definition (professional, salaried, educated) and who declares themselves working class (manual labour, earns wages by the hour or day) and disdains the class they have become.

I actually agree with you, I do not think a definition is required and I do not define myself in terms of class, because as I said earlier in the thread, it changes nothing and in my book is all rather stupid.

However you (as in anyone) define class, the one thing it's not is your parents, it's you as an individual.

Because because class IS a thing. It offers advantages and disadvantages and pretending it doesn't is foolish.

I got to go to University mostly because my parents are wealthy and put me through a hot-housing education where o got much better grades than I would have at the local comp.. My first job was through a family friend (the position was unadvertised) and a massive leapfrog in my career.

My parents helped me and my siblings with our first houses. Although not a massive amount of money, it got us on the housing ladder at a fortuitous time.

I wince at people who are at pains to talk about or demonstrate their class; middle, working or otherwise. As others have said, I notice lots of people talking about their workingclassness with privately educated children and new cars every 3 years.

I think the man in the OP comes across very well. He acknowledged his head start in life; he wasn't looking down on others.

Just because I'm now rich and my DC attended public school doesn't mean that I am no longer working class.

Their privilege is not mine.

I grew up as a working class person in a working class family in a working class community. Why would that change because I educated myself and made a bit of brass?

So can a person not change class; it only happens between generations cautiontape?

Oh, and it's highly unlikely you educated yourself although the point you alluded to is true - you can't buy class.

I think in the UK class is primarily a cultural association. The builder who did our loft conversion would appear middle class to most english class antennae - listened to radio 4, had an RP accent, would suspect went to public school. The fact he was a builder didn't change the fact that most people would within 20 seconds of speaking to him establish that he didn't fit the standard class profile of a builder. So jobs make a difference, but they aren't a determining factor as much as background, education, and self-identified affiliations. My dad for instance deliberately chose to lose his sarf London accent during his 20s.

I don't think there are any rules to class and moving from one to the other.

If someone feels they have changed class and wishes to identify with a new one that feels authentic then that's a matter for them.

But I don't feel any different in terms of class. I still identify strongly with my class of birth. And I don't share many MC values, despite being professional, well off etc

Sorry pressed post too soon. So he's not easily placeable in class terms - he grew up poor (very poor), left school at 15, but got up to PhD level through night school, loves classical music and has an almost - but not quite - RP accent. Married 'up'. But many aspects of middle class culture leave him baffled, especially surrounding food. People belong in complicated ways to particular class cultures, but it doesn't mean that they don't exist - like I said, those who grow up in the UK are generally exceptionally canny at identifying people's class affiliations, even when they are quite complicated..

I agree caution. And even growing up in a pretty solidly middle class environment, the fact that my grandparents were working class gives me a cultural heritage that feels very different to those who have been middle class for generations - I have friends whose parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc all went to university, and it feels to me that they take that kind of life for granted in a way that I never do. I never forget that my granny who was the cleverest, wittiest person I ever met, had to leave school at 13 and slog it away in service of one kind or another for the next 80 or so years.

It seems to make certain MC people very antsy that I don't identify as MC or want to.

Yet to me it would feel ridiculous and inauthentic to do so.

I'm the other way if anything. Grew up middle class/grammar school/Oxbridge/ radio 4 / mc values/hobbies to a certain extent. But divorce and family difficulties mean living in a very w/c estate and that feeling of not quite fitting in. I never had the extended family netwrok/ease of connections for jobs though and I think in more upper middle class families may not have "fallen" as far as me!!

Had a mate who grew up middle class but married a working class man. We were having a joke saying she is working class now she protested a bit then said ok I am working class with middle class values!! I was shocked and was a bit mad with her and said do you not think working class people have no values! I don’t like the class system if I am honest!

What MC values do you not identify with, CT? Genuinely interested

Fantasmagoria surely she was just saying that it was a different set of values, not that there weren't w class values?

lala I suppose the values I mean ( which of course does not mean all MC people adhere to them or no WC class people do) include thrift, self discipline, self denial, quiet aesthetic taste.

I don't value the future over the present.

That's not to say that I don't think these values can't be a jolly good thing. But they're not forefront in my culture and I've never felt the need or the will to adopt them.

It's the same with MC signifiers. I know what they are and I could adopt them but I simply can't see what they'd bring to my particular party.

And any MC signifiers I do display are always because I genuinely like them (rather than to signify my status or wealth or education etc).

Because because class IS a thing. It offers advantages and disadvantages and pretending it doesn't is foolish

I still don't agree with you. Nothing you said is exclusively "middle class".

Kids of working clsss parents go to uni, it's ridiculous to suggest otherwise, working class parents can know people who own companies and have connections. Working clsss parents help their kids onto the property ladder, even if it's by providing a roof over their head whilst they save, or even providing a deposit. Working class does not equate to poor. Middle class does not mean wealthy.

None of what you said is specifically and exclusively class related. There is no I'm middle class so I went to uni or I'm middle class so I had connections that leap frogged me in my career or I'm middle class so my parents helped me onto the properly ladder, those things do and do not happen to people irrelevant of class.

For me, we are all unique. We are not just one big humongous group split into three. Why the need to define yourself?

As I keep saying. You can shout you're working class or middle class till you're blue in the face, it will change nothing about your day to day life, from the job you do, to the pay you get or the house uou live in. It changes nothing. So why do it? Who are you telling? Your friends, your family, your colleagues? Strangers on the internet who would walk past you in the street?

It is totally and utterly irrelevant. An antiquated notion of something that should have died quietly a long time ago and now be laughed about.

And what's even more ridiculous about this daft class notion, is not that the only people you tell your class to or discuss it with is folks you know, it is the overwhelming majority of people can't even define or agree on what makes you a given class. the classes. They have to take a test on the bbc to know what they are.

If you're only telling folks who know you and strangers on the net, and you don't even know what a given class is and the odds are the person you're talking to doesn't know what it is or defines it a different way, what exactly is the point..,

How lovely to get some teacher-bashing on a thread about class. It’s like MN bingo.

Teaching is a graduate profession. There are plenty of teachers from WC backgrounds who may even still consider themselves to be WC but it is a traditional middle-class profession alongside the law, ‘real’ engineering which requires a degree, medicine, academia etc.

Hear, hear Bluntness.

Yeah, it's so daft as a notion that sociologists have spent over a century devoting their careers to studying it. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it magically not exist. Class objectively determines your children's life course in this country like pretty much nothing else. You may as well say that depression is totally made up because different people have really different subjective experiences of it. Ignorant nonsense.

You're welcome to consider the labels total bollocks but you absolutely cannot deny the entrenched privileges and disadvantages which underlie our entire society. The report on the Social Mobility Index from the end of last month should embarrass us all.

The poster upthread who considers 'middle class' to mean 'able to pay comfortably for private education' is twenty years out of date. Private education has never been less affordable as a proportion of income. The middle-middle classes are now closing ranks and using their cultural capital to secure places in the best state schools, entrenching divisions further and making it harder and harder for disadvantaged kids to get a leg up.

But as long as we can dismiss it all as a silly preoccupation with cutlery and skiing holidays then we can pretend that this isn't a problem.

Yes, it is a really politically regressive position to deny that class exists. Britain is one of the most unequal societies in Europe, and entrenched class division is a large part of why this is. It's a bit of a laugh to talk about whether your car is messy or not as a measure of class position, but the baseline is deadly serious. It's about how poor kids stay poor down the generations.